The automotive, aerospace, heavy equipment, manufacturing, and other industries seek to improve the quality and reliability of vehicles by incorporating fault diagnosis and prognosis features into vehicles or off-board monitoring at technical centers. For example, fault codes (e.g., diagnostic trouble codes (DTCs) may be used by technicians (e.g., vehicle technicians, aircraft technicians, manufacturing technicians), quality engineers (e.g., vehicle quality engineers, aerospace quality engineers, etc.), diagnostic engineers and other parties to identify and diagnose vehicle, aircraft, aeronautical vehicle, heavy equipment, machinery, or other device malfunctions. Fault codes may, for example, include diagnostic trouble codes, which may be used for vehicle diagnostics. Diagnostic trouble codes may, for example, be the output of a diagnostic method or system which continuously monitors a specific component (e.g., a sensor associated with a vehicle component, system, circuit or other device) and may be stored in vehicle electronic control unit (ECU). Diagnostic trouble codes may indicate a failure, malfunction, or defect in a system, component, circuit or other electrical device. Diagnostic trouble codes may, for example, include system-level diagnostic codes (SDTCs), component or circuit-level DTCs, and other types of DTCs. Diagnostic trouble codes may, for example, indicate a failure, malfunction, or defect of a vehicle system (e.g., engine misfire, evaporative system performance, battery failure, or other vehicle system failures). Component or circuit-level DTCs may, for example, indicate failure, malfunction, or defect of a vehicle component (e.g., fuel injector, mass airflow (MAF) sensor, etc.). Typically, a component is a part of a system and/or subsystem; e.g., a fuel injector may be a part of an engine system. In some cases a system may be a component of a larger system. System-level faults may, for example, be triggered due to any of component or circuit-level related faults in that system. For example, an engine misfire system-level fault could be triggered due to injector circuit failure, mass air flow circuit failure, fuel pump malfunction, etc.
In some cases, a system fault code (e.g. a system DTC) may potentially result from multiple failure modes or root causes. A failure mode may, for example, include part name information and possibly other information describing or representing a malfunction or failure. A failure mode or root cause may be associated with multiple unique combinations of component fault codes (e.g. component DTCs), system fault codes (e.g., system DTCs), and/or other information. Existing techniques are unable to identify failure modes have the same or similar fault code or DTC signatures (e.g., combinations of system DTCs, component DTCs, and/or other DTCs). It may, therefore, be difficult to determine failure modes and root causes of vehicle malfunctions based on system fault codes or combinations of system fault codes, component fault codes and/or other fault codes. It may, therefore, be difficult for vehicle technicians, quality engineers, and others to determine vehicle malfunction root causes, fleet wide vehicle malfunction trends, and other information using existing techniques.